What is Strategic Planning ?

· Strategic planning is a process through which business leaders map out their vision for their organization’s growth and how they’re going to get there. The strategic planning process informs your organization’s decisions, growth, and goals.

· Strategic planning helps you clearly define your company’s long-term objectives—and maps how your short-term goals and work will help you achieve them. This, in turn, gives you a clear sense of where your organization is going and allows you to ensure your teams are working on projects that make the most impact. Think of it this way—if your goals and objectives are your destination on a map, your strategic plan is your navigation system.

A strategic plan is the end result of the strategic planning process. At its most basic, it’s a tool used to define your organization’s goals and what actions you’ll take to achieve them. Typically, your strategic plan should include: •Your company’s vision statement •Your company’s mission statement •Your organizational goals, including your long-term goals and short-term, yearly objectives •Any plan of action, tactics, or approaches you plan to take to meet those goals •What could derail the STRAP from happening, and therefore pre-empting those challenges by planning for countermeasures in advance. Being forewarned means being forearmed.

What are the benefits of Strategic Planning ?

Strategic planning can help with goal setting and decision-making by allowing you to map out how your company will move toward your organization’s vision and mission statements in the next three to five years. Let’s circle back to our map metaphor. If you think of your company trajectory as a line on a map, a strategic plan can help you better quantify how you’ll get from point A (where you are now) to point B (where you want to be in a few years), and agree on what concrete measures to take, in order to get there.

When you create and share a clear strategic plan with your team, you can: •Build a strong organizational culture by clearly defining and aligning on your organization’s mission, vision, and goals. This reduces the chances of ill-thought out hunches driving action. •Align everyone around a shared purpose and ensure all departments and teams are working toward a common objective. •Proactively set objectives to help you get where you want to go and achieve desired outcomes. •Promote a long-term vision for your company rather than focusing primarily on short-term gains. Note that a STRAP cannot succeed if it ONLY has the longer-term vision; it forces planning, resourcing and actionable steps to make incremental gains that culminate in achieving the long-term vision. •Ensure resources are allocated around the most high-impact priorities. Often businesses realize the imbalance of resource allocation (people, process, financial investment, etc.) around the less relevant priorities once it is clearly and starkly codified in a STRAP. •Define long-term goals and set shorter-term goals to support them. •Assess your current situation and identify any opportunities—or threats—allowing your organization to mitigate potential risks. •Create a proactive business culture that enables your organization to respond more swiftly to emerging market changes and opportunities

What are the 5 steps in Strategic Planning ?

The strategic planning process involves a structured methodology that guides the organization from vision to implementation. The strategic planning process starts with assembling a small, dedicated team of key strategic planners—typically 3 to 5 members of an SME—who will form the strategic planning, or management, committee. This team is responsible for gathering crucial information, guiding the development of the plan, and overseeing strategy execution. Most importantly, they will champion the effort and should include the senior leaders to ensure it gets the oxygen needed to flourish. Yes, it can be demanding and requires disproportionate time commitment when everyone is already busy. So to avoid the STRAP effort falling by the way-side, or worse a rote document that sits on the shelf and not put into action, senior leadership focus will make the difference.

Once you’ve established your management committee, you can get to work on the planning process.

Step 1 - Assess your Business Environment

Before you can define where you’re going, you first need to define where you are. Understanding the external environment, including market trends and competitive landscape, is crucial in the initial assessment phase of strategic planning. To do this, your management committee should collect a variety of information from additional stakeholders, like employees and customers. In particular, plan to gather: •Relevant industry and market data to inform any market opportunities, as well as any potential upcoming threats in the near future. •Customer insights to understand what your customers want from your company—like product improvements or additional services. •Employee feedback that needs to be addressed—whether about the product, business practices, or the day-to-day company culture. Executive Outcomes Consultancy will use different types of strategic planning tools and analytical techniques to gather this information, such as: •A balanced scorecard to help you evaluate four major elements of a business: learning and growth, business processes, customer satisfaction, and financial performance. •A SWOT analysis to help you assess both current and future potential for the business (you’ll return to this analysis periodically during the strategic planning process). To fill out each letter in the SWOT acronym, your management committee will answer a series of questions: Strengths (this refers to the internal organizations strengths, things that you do well ): •What does your organization currently do well? •What separates you from your competitors? •What are your most valuable internal resources? •What tangible assets do you have? •What is your biggest strength? Weaknesses (this refers to the internal organizations weaknesses, things that hamper you): •What does your organization do poorly? •What do you currently lack (whether that’s a product, resource, or process)? •What do your competitors do better than you? •What, if any, limitations are holding your organization back? •What processes or products need improvement? Opportunities (this refers to external, ie the markets opportunities that offer your organization a sustainable advantage): •What opportunities does your organization have? •How can you leverage your unique company strengths? •Are there any trends that you can take advantage of? •How can you capitalize on marketing or press opportunities? •Is there an emerging need for your product or service? Threats (this refers to external threats that without addressing them, could damage your organizations longer-term survival): •What emerging competitors should you keep an eye on? •Are there any weaknesses that expose your organization to risk? •Have you or could you experience negative press that could reduce market share? •Is there a chance of changing customer attitudes towards your company?

Step 2 - Identify your company's goals and objectives

To begin strategy development, take into account your current position, which is where you are now. Then, draw inspiration from your vision, mission, and current position to identify and define your goals—these are your final destination. To develop your strategy, you’re essentially pulling out your compass and asking, “Where are we going next?” “What’s the ideal future state of this company?” This can help you figure out which path you need to take to get there. During this phase of the planning process, take inspiration from important company documents, such as: •Your mission statement, to understand how you can continue moving towards your organization’s core purpose. •Your vision statement, to clarify how your strategic plan fits into your long-term vision. •Your company values, to guide you towards what matters most towards your company. •Your competitive advantages, to understand what unique benefit you offer to the market. •Your long-term goals, to track where you want to be in five or 10 years. •Your financial forecast and projection, to understand where you expect your financials to be in the next three years, what your expected cash flow is, and what new opportunities you will likely be able to invest in.

Step 3 - Develop your Strategic Plan and performance metrics

Now that you understand where you are and where you want to go, it’s time to put pen to paper. Take your current business position and strategy into account, as well as your organization’s goals and objectives, and build out a strategic plan for the next three to five years. Keep in mind that even though you’re creating a long-term plan, parts of your plan should be created or revisited as the quarters and years go on. As you build your strategic plan, you should define: •Company priorities for the next three to five years, based on your SWOT analysis and strategy. •Yearly objectives for the first year. You don’t need to define your objectives for every year of the strategic plan. As the years go on, create new yearly objectives that connect back to your overall strategic goals. •Identify your growth opportunities and categorize them based on your confidence to achieve them. Expanding your offerings to existing customers has a different probability of effort and resources required (and probability of success), than a blue-sky innovation not yet developed. A STRAP should have a balanced scorecard to all such opportunities, as it slearly and unambiguously lays out for all, what the longer-term growth plan is based on. •Related key results and KPIs. Some of these should be set by the management committee, and some should be set by specific teams that are closer to the work. Make sure your key results and KPIs are measurable and actionable. These KPIs will help you track progress and ensure you’re moving in the right direction. •Budget for the next year or few years. This should be based on your financial forecast as well as your direction. Do you need to spend aggressively to develop your product? Build your team? Make a dent with marketing? Clarify your most important initiatives and how you’ll budget for those. •A high-level project roadmap. A project roadmap is a tool in project management that helps you visualize the timeline of a complex initiative, but you can also create a very high-level project roadmap for your strategic plan. Outline what you expect to be working on in certain quarters or years to make the plan more actionable and understandable.

Step 4 - Implement and share your plan

Now it’s time to put your plan into action. Strategy implementation involves clear communication across your entire organization to make sure everyone knows their responsibilities and how to measure the plan’s success. Make sure your team (especially senior leadership) has access to the strategic plan, so they can understand how their work contributes to company priorities and the overall strategy map. We recommend sharing your plan in the same tool you use to manage and track work, so you can more easily connect high-level objectives to daily work. A few tips to make sure your plan will be executed without a hitch: •Communicate clearly to your entire organization throughout the implementation process, to ensure all team members understand the strategic plan and how to implement it effectively. •Define what “success” looks like by mapping your strategic plan to key performance indicators. •Ensure that the actions outlined in the strategic plan are integrated into the daily operations of the organization, so that every team member's daily activities are aligned with the broader strategic objectives. •Regularly monitor and share the progress of the strategic plan with the entire organization, to keep everyone informed and reinforce the importance of the plan. •Establish regular check-ins to monitor the progress of your strategic plan and make adjustments as needed.

Step 5 - Revise and Restructure as needed

Step 5: Revise and restructure as needed Once you’ve created and implemented your new strategic framework, the final step of the planning process is to monitor and manage your plan. A wise military leader once said “The best-laid plan does not survive first-contact with the enemy”. This does not mean Strategic Planning does not work in the real world. It means, A Strategic Plan allows a business to react swiftly to the inevitable change in circumstances that wil occur. Remember, your strategic plan isn’t set in stone. You’ll need to revisit and update the plan if your company changes directions or makes new investments. As new market opportunities and threats come up, you’ll likely want to tweak your strategic plan. Make sure to review your plan regularly—meaning quarterly and annually—to ensure it’s still aligned with your organization’s vision and goals. Keep in mind that your plan won’t last forever, even if you do update it frequently. A successful strategic plan evolves with your company’s long-term goals. When you’ve achieved most of your strategic goals, or if your strategy has evolved significantly since you first made your plan, it might be time to create a new one.

How Hussey & Associates can help you

Hussey & Associates can help you with the entire process of creating your businesses Strategic Planning process. All 5 steps are facilitated by Paul Hussey, who has 20 years experience doing this across the globe. While each circumstance and business need is unique, in general the best practice has the following characteristics;

1. Stage 0 involves 2 days of effort by the Management Committee, facilitated by Paul.

2. Stage 1 through 3, will involve the wider team, and ideally be done over 3 days, preferably in person.

Stages 4 and 5 are on-going, typically led by the Senior Management.

Both academic research and practical experience tell is that too many SME’s do not focus on Strategic Planning for their long-term growth. The reasons are complex, but fundamentally a lack of time, a lack of specialised expertise, inadequate knowledge of the planning processes, or a reluctance xxxx. However, empirical evidence This is supported in the empirical literature. With respect to performance, strategic planning is generally more common in better performing SMEs. For example, SMEs that engage in strategic planning (compared to those that do not) are more likely to be those that achieve higher sales growth, higher returns on assets, higher margins on profit and higher employee growth.

Why use a Facilitator for a businesses Strategic Planning process ?

There are many reasons to bring in a professional Facilitator to help navigate your Strategic Planning process. Everyone can participate - the business leader cannot lead and facilitate a conversation at the same time. The facilitator frees up the leadership to put in the effort to ensure the best conversation possible. It is a specialized process - it involves the need for experience, best practice as well as the tools of management science. A facilitator can ask the right questions, to get to the heart of the matter The Facilitator is neutral to decisions - having no "iron in the fire", nor any vested interest in decisions, ensures the conversations remain based on objective criteria. The Facilitator sets the tone - bringing in a professional sends a clear message to the organisation that the business is clearly investing seriously, and displays sincerity of intent. Control of time and direction of conversation - the Facilitator ensures everyone is heard, and the discussion remains relevant and on-point. If the direction mires or drifts, it can be quickly brought back to relevancy and avoid power dynamics that would censure openness. Its a people management skill - it requires the skills of someone used to the EQ and personality types to syncronise everyone skillfully The power of using an external professional to get the ball rolling - its often the first step that is the hardest. While the execution of the Strategy ultimately lies with the leadership, the Facilitator brings everyone together and forces thinking and ownership.
Who from the business should be included in this ?

It is imperative that the Strategic Planning process is seen as having Senior Leadership championing, in order for the entire organisation to buy-in not only to the exercise, but the also outcome and the agreed road-map of growth goals. Hence, not only the CEO / Managing Director should be a driving force, but other key Leaders such as the CFO, HR, Sales, Operations, etc. For the workshop, all the Senior team should attend in person, as well as select key contributors. For the report-out of the final version, key Stakeholders (such as the Chairman, Board members, Advisors, etc. ) should participate to get their endorsement, and ultimately the CEO should bring everyone together for a communications session, to let everyone know what the strategic choices and direction the business is taking.
How much time does this effort require ?

For most organisations, we can have a holistic and detailed Strategic Planning process completed within 10 to 12 weeks. A sample timeline Pre-work- 4 weeks ( working with the key Management and STRAP leadership) Strategic planning in person takes 2 to 3 days, virtually takes 5 weeks + post work as needed. Plan competition and roll out and communication of the STRAP: 4 to 5 weeks. This does not include the time needed to begin the implementation
What does the end-result look like for a Strategic Planning process ?

Tangibly, the end result will be a living document that captures the entire effort, linking where the business sits today, where it wants to be in 3 to 5 years, the steps to take it there, the financial impact, what resources are needed, the HR Organisational Development changes that may have to happen, and what Operations needs to do to deliver on that growth. It is the collective pooling of industry knowledge, the capture of "tribal knowledge" of the business, the SWOT analysis of the internal and external forces that act upon the organization. In many ways, it is the codification of the action plan required for the business to grow and prosper. Furthermore, it means that all activities of the business can be measured, based on objective criteria, and bring all members back to what was strategically agreed to, to ensure commonality of purpose. And finally, its iterative. Naturally business circumstances change, so by committing to this cycle annually, it allows the business to adjust and tweak its direction, while staying true to the core principles codified in the STRAP.
Why use Hussey & Associates for this ?

Paul Hussey has over 20 years of leading Strategic Planning processes, and brings a wealth of experience in understanding how to tailor it to a particular businesses needs. He was the Vice President of Strategic Planning for Honeywell International, and then as CEO led the annual effort for the businesses he ran, in order to set the short, medium and longer term goals and objectives for the Board's approval. A major global investment bank hired Paul to facilitate their Strategic Planning cycle over a two year period.
Is this expensive ?

A; Hiring Hussey & Associates on a project basis is highly efficient and very cost-effective for the results; it is a discrete piece of work that is owned by the business. Please contact us to discuss the parameters of your needs and we can prepare a quote for the services